We keep hearing how North Carolina’s unemployment rate keeps lagging behind the national average. And although this trend is certainly real—the Tarheel State’s unemployment remains mired above 9 percent while the national average is below 8 percent—the latest issue of Prosperity Watch provides a surprising explanation for North Carolina’s weaker performance. See Prosperity Watch for details.

3 Comments

Doug

April 24, 2013 at 5:12 pm

Allan,
Is it really surprising that since we were more deeply affected by the recession that we would take a longer path out of it?

Is this just a post to promote the NC Justice center’s Google hits? I clicked a couple of times just to see if I missed something. If they spent money on some “study” to come up with that page they must have all kinds of cash to burn.

Allan Freyer

April 24, 2013 at 5:17 pm

Doug, I don’t think it’s surprising at all that NC is lagging the national average because we fell further during the recession. But it is apparently surprising to folks who keep saying that the reason we’re lagging the national average is because our “business climate” and “tax policy” are somehow “uncompetitive.”

Thanks for making our point for us!

Doug

April 25, 2013 at 11:33 am

You are welcome….that is not evident from your post and I don’t have ESP.

Although, we need to take those items you list and run with them so we can become competitive. Why did we fall farther….uncompetitive….why is it harder for businesses to hire people back…..uncompetitiveness…..we need to fix the broken systems the dems put in place to put us in this poor environment where so many are subject to layoffs, and the resulting long term effects of little recovery from those layoffs.